World leaders to square off at Sunnylands

Chinese soldiers carry a giant Chinese national flag during training for an anniversary parade in Beijing.
Photo: AP

by
Geoffrey Barker

Next week’s meeting between
Barack Obama
and
Xi Jinping
will be the most important and closely observed diplomatic encounter of the year.

American allies—including Australia—will be watching intently to see to how the US president and the new Chinese leader will move to shape their complex and often competitive relationship.

Obama and Xi will meet on June 7 and 8 at the Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, California, for what will be their first meeting since Xi became China’s President in March.

Obviously, they will review current political issues in their relationship, including economic and trade relations, North Korea’s serial nuclear delinquency, territorial disputes in the South China Sea, cyber espionage, and the US military rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific region.

But perhaps the most significant issue will be how the two leaders address their long-term strategic relationship in the context of China’s rise to great power status and the US desire to remain the preponderant world power.

This is of immense importance to Australia. The recent defence white paper declared that “the relationship between the United States and China . . . will more than any other single factor determine our strategic environment over coming decades". The same might be said by Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and most other Asian nations.

Already there are calls by some experts for the US to accept the inevitability of China’s eventual emergence as the major power and for Obama to appease Xi by accepting that the US has no choice but to start giving way to China. It has long been the view of Hugh White, the Australian National University’s professor of strategic studies, that the US and its allies should effectively move now to appease China or risk adverse consequences.

Now, in Forbes business magazine, a prominent Hong Kong-based US banker and former State Department official
Stephen Harner
has argued that the most Obama might be able to do at Sunnylands “is to listen and begin taking small steps in China’s direction . . . My guess is that Obama — unless he is ill-advised — will accept much, if not all of China’s argument. And he will be correct, and correctly advancing the United States’ longer term interests, in doing so.

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“What should be clear . . . is that Obama’s ‘Asian pivot’ policy was conceptually flawed, provocative to China and sure to fail," Harner writes.

Notwithstanding the powerful symbolism of Xi’s early visit to the US, and claims by China’s Xinhua news agency that China is determined to follow “a policy of all-dimensional diplomacy, peaceful development and all-win co-operation", Harner’s argument seems a counsel of despair. China is doubtless emerging as a formidable global military power with increasingly potent weaponry, but it is streets behind the US, which is still by far the world’s biggest military spender. The current US budget sequestration, for all its disruptive impact, will not affect the US military posture and power.

China and the US certainly have complex trade and economic relations, but the two economies are so inter-dependent that China’s continuing rise is significantly dependent on good relations with the US. That is partly why Xi will present a smiling face at Sunnylands.

Moreover the continuing rise of China is not preordained and inevitable. The country has immense internal social and political problems, which are likely to persist as the vital and innovative US economy rebounds from the GFC.

Above all, however, China under Xi remains an authoritarian Leninist state that despises liberal western notions including open debate, the rule of law and multi-party political freedom, and human rights. It would be no easy matter for any US president to take steps in China’s direction under these circumstances.

Of course the two leaders will put on a cordial show at Sunnylands and optimistic Western analysts will hail a new era in relations. Those with darker views will be hard to hear over the applause.

But the cheerleaders would do well to note that in one prelude to the Sunnylands summit Xi’s central committee issued an edict ordering university professors not to teach the “seven speak-nots", a policy now incorporated into China’s online opinion censorship. The “seven speak-nots" are universal values, freedom of the press, civil society, civic rights, historical mistakes by the Communist Party, crony networks and judicial independence. The central committee memo also urged officials to be relentless in their opposition to the West.

Of course China, like the US, is a complex polity with many cross-cutting internal pressures, some more extreme than others. But the cheerleaders should remember the seven speak-nots when Xi turns on his Sunnylands smile next month.